Alchemy Study Notes
The textbook can be found here. Various symbols mentioned in the following notes are also to be found there. What is Alchemy? Alchemy is the philosophy that the world is fundamentally understandable, and that through its rigorous study humanity can transcend its earthly limitations and reach enlightenment. This transcendence is frequently symbolised by the transmutation of base metals into precious ones, the search for the ultimate cure (the Panacea), and the creation of the Elixir of Life. Alchemy is also the practical aspect of this philosophy: the actual transmutation of elements, the research into the fundamentals of the universe and of magic, the growth of power and the journey to knowledge. It involves experimentation and observation, and as such can be very dangerous. Amongst the first forays into this understanding is research into that which makes up the world, to wit, the elements. Alchemical History and Symbols What are the elements? The first attempts to describe and explain nature involved the Classical Elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. A fifth element, Spirit or the Aether, is sometimes described, too. Through experimentation and the application of the Alchemical or Scientific Method, muggles have found out that these are not actual fundamental elements of the world, but rather that everything is made up of very very tiny non-classical elemental particles such as Oxygen or Hydrogen or Carbon, which are themselves made of even tinier things called electrons and protons and neutrons, and this does not even begin to cover the myriad discoveries made in the past two thousand years. Nowadays, what the "real" elements are is exactly these tiny things, which the muggles have organised into a chart called the "Periodic Table" that lists their properties. This does not mean that the Classical Elements, which include things like Wood and Metal from other cultures, too, aren't important, because magic is fueled by sapient thought, and therefore for as long as sapient people hold the mystique of the Elements in their imaginarium they will be an important part of magic. The earthly and celestial elements The four Classical Elements (Fire, Water, Earth, and Air) are symbolised by triangles in certain configurations, as can be found in the textbook. Ancient philosophers believed that the world was built up from these things, though Plato was the first to call them 'elements.' They were called base, earthly, and corruptible, mundane, for they could change and be affected by each other and time. The fifth Classical Element, the Aether, whose symbol is the same as that of Spirit, is what the Heavenly regions were believed to be made of. It is the perfect element, unchanged and unchangeable, and it was believed that the essence of everything could be traced back to this perfection. This element was believed to be present in all things mundane to a greater or lesser extent, giving the world its ideal shape, from which it deviated due to its corruption. Why 'Wingardium Leviosa'? The Levitation Charm was invented in 1544 by a British wizard called Jarleth Hobart, and the incantation used, along with a swish and a flick of the wand, is 'Wingardium Leviosa.' But why? Magical people in Mahoutokoro use Wingardium Leviosa, too, even though they speak Japanese and not English. Why do we use Wingardium Leviosa instead of some word in Japanese or Latin or even a completely made up sequence of syllables - although, as a point of fact, Wingardium Leviosa is a made up sequence of syllables not present in any language. The most honest answer is that no one knows. Some people believe that magic is discovered, not invented, and this seems to hold some truth. However, it is a promising hypothesis amongst leading magical theory researchers that the incantations and names of the spells we use are just the symbols that magic itself found to latch onto, when someone was inventing the spell. Fine magic and thought are inextricable. It's with thought that intelligent magical species give form to magic, and it's why those species are capable of wielding magic much more powerful, controlled, and terrifying than even the mightiest of beasts. The control a non-intelligent magical creature, like a Dragon, has over its own magic is no better than the control a muggle animal has over such features as spurs, fangs, and claws as it might have. They can't reshape magic like we can, like House Elves can; they use it as it comes to them. Intelligent creatures, on understanding and giving meaning to the world, give shape to magic, and can use it with much more versatility than other beings. Alchemical Circles An Alchemical Circle draws from that connection between magic and sapient thought. By using symbols which, due to fame and a connection to sapient species' imagination, have gained collective meaning and power, one can channel magic. Humans can perform magic without words and even without wands, but the presence of both as foci for their magic makes it much easier than it would otherwise be. Think of the Alchemical Circle, then, as a further focus, as if there was another layer of incantation added to facilitate magic. When you use a correctly-drawn Alchemical Circle, your magic becomes more powerful and easier to cast, and some magic that would be otherwise impossible becomes possible. However, if you draw the Circle incorrectly, it tries to focus the magic on a place that doesn't exist, and you get a burst of concentrated magic that can fail catastrophically. Please refer to the textbook for a more in-depth explanation of Alchemical Circles in all their forms. The Elemental Cycle Aristotle's elemental philosophy held that Transmutation was a basic aspect of nature. The elements were always changing from one to the other: water turns to "air" (vapour) by adding heat, as "earth" (coal) turns to fire by adding heat. Only the Aether, the fifth element, was immune to such changes, as it held the true nature of the ideal world in its breast. Each element was said to be a combination of heat and wetness: water is wet and cold; air is wet and hot; fire is dry and hot; earth is dry and cold. If you change one of these properties, you get the corresponding element. When you have wet and cold water and add heat to it, you get wet and hot air - vapour -, and dry and cold earth - residual matter and salts. And in the drier seasons, fires are much more common, because when you take the wetness from the air you're left with fire. Thus, olden alchemists were perfectly satisfied with their explanations. And they were, as a matter of simple fact, wrong about all of this. The Aether, Quintessence, and the Elixir of Life Everything was said to have a quintessence in the Aether, a trace of the ideal perfection in its core. Galileo once referred poetically to wine as "light held together by moisture," and indeed many olden alchemists saw the pure distilled alcohol as a physical manifestation of the Aether. A famous Arabic writer called Jabir ibn Hayyan was one of the bases of a belief that it was possible to draw the Elixir of Life from the distillation of substances. It was believed, then, that the Elixir wasn't so much a product of a mixture as it was the result of the careful distillation of many substances. Alcohol seemed to be a good candidate for at least one step in the search for it: it was water that burned, that gave life and energy and warmth. When placed in alcohol, organic substances didn't decay as quickly. You could dissolve materials that weren't soluble in water in it. It was a break from the Aristotelian elemental cycle, cold and wet that could instantaneously become hot and dry. In that time's imaginarium, the fifth essence was, in a certain sense, the purest component of its original material. And in their undying search for the Elixir, through distillation of many plants and minerals, alchemists ended up creating medicines, substances that could be used to treat and even cure ailments, which gave them hope that they were on the right track towards the Elixir. There was no consensus. People believed these fifth essences to be the prima materia, the fundamental matter that was the perfected Platonic ideal of the material world. Matter out of which God - for much of old Alchemy was based on monotheistic religion - had fashioned the universe. Heavenly essence. Some believed that it wasn't that the Heavenly Matter was itself in the substances, but rather that it was the process of distillation which drew this fifth essence from everything. This would mean that, no matter which substance you started with, you'd be able to get the essence of the world from it. Mercury and Sulfur Raymond Lull was a physician and philosopher. He wasn't an alchemist. Yet, authorship of books wasn't as easy to decide in those days as it is today, so many people, wishing to sell their books with a guise of credibility, said they had been written by Lull, and borrowed elements of his philosophy in their work. One of them was that the prima materia was mercury, which resided in every single thing that existed, all four elements, which was the embodiment of quintessence, and the substance through which matter effected change on other matter. Sulfur and mercury, when referred to in Alchemy, are not the actual chemical elements you will find in the muggle Periodic Table. Salt is often talked about in addition to them as part of a triad. Aristotle postulated the existence of intermediate substances as the result of transmutation: when water was heated into air, we got watery vapour; when earth was heated into fire, we got smoky earth. These intermediate substances would combine to turn into the metals of the world. Later writers called them mercury and sulfur. To them, every metal, then, is a combination of these two plus the other four elements, in different degrees of purity. Gold is the purest of all metals dominated by sulfur; silver is the purest of all metals dominated by mercury. Each metal was said to be influenced by a planet, and to have some of that planet's quintessence in it. The purest of metals, though, were thought to be of the same essence as the sun and the moon, and so their symbols are exactly the same as those of the celestial bodies. Another common belief was that of the seeds, or souls, of the metals. Plato used to say that there was a certain vital principle in all things, a capacity for growth. Plant seeds, and baby animals, those are just the quickest and most obvious examples, available to anyone who looked. But metals, the earth, water, matter itself, they all grew and developed. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that all things sought their own perfection, but weren't necessarily alive. The ideal of their being, hidden in their quintessences, was always pulling them towards this perfection. Whichever way, the conclusion was that, just like living beings grow and evolve, so does what we'd call inanimate matter. Coal, after a long time under the earth, becomes a diamond; so, too, do metals seek their perfection, and all metals, if left to Nature, would eventually become their purest form: silver or gold, depending on their regent component. Thus the alchemical search for the transmutation of base metals into gold or silver wasn't one for the change of nature; it was, rather, just a search for a way to hurry nature along its path. Alchemists believed their metals would reach their perfection eventually, so why not make that happen faster and profit? The Alchemical or Scientific Method Alchemy is, as explained, a philosophy that the world can be understood and thus controlled. The Scientific Method is a series of rules and techniques on how to do that. Observation and explanation. The muggle idea of Science is that the world is not chaotic, it's not completely random, and everything that is not random can be described and explained. The Scientific Method consists of trying to figure out how the world works. To do that, you have to look at the world, and not just with your eyes. Hearing things, smelling things, touching them, using your magic on them, detecting them with charms or muggle technology, all of that is 'looking.' After you see something happen enough times, you start to notice a pattern. When you've seen a ball fall enough times, you notice there's a relation between how long it takes the ball to fall and how high it was, no matter how heavy the ball is. When you see a pattern, you can try to use it to make predictions. For example, after seeing the balls of different weights enough times, you could predict that everything always obeys that same rule, and try to figure out whether you were right. Why is this relevant, though? Why would it be important for a wizard or a witch to know this? What's the advantage? The advantage is that that which you know, you can control. Alchemy is about perfection, figuring out your shortcomings and how to beat them, it's about reaching Transcendence. It's about mastering the world, and to master the world, you need to know it. Alchemical Circles are largely experimental. Inventing new spells, potions, this is experimental, too. You need to look at the world, to look at magic, and try to figure out how it works, and how you can make it work better. Muggles don't live in the muck. They have reached the Moon. Literally, they have sent people there, without any magic. They did that because they understood gravity, and they understood other things, too, that let them beat gravity without magic. If magic is like casting Imperio on Nature to make Her do what you want, science is like knowing Her so well that you know exactly what to do or say to make Her serve you of her own free will. Science doesn't have charms, because science doesn't actually do anything. Science is just knowledge. The way the muggles beat gravity wasn't by making it go away. Gravity was still there. But they knew that if you burned a thing very hotly, it would produce enough energy and expel enough matter that it would push their vehicle up. Just like you can jump, what they did was figure out a way of jumping so strongly that they escaped the Earth. No magic involved, no spells, just figuring out how to produce a really strong jump. Knowledge, as opposed to action. What falls faster? If you grab a heavy (and unenchanted) Bludger and a lighter (and unenchanted) Quaffle and release both from the same height at the same time, which one reaches the ground first? The answer is neither, they both reach it at the same time. And how do we know this? Because we have actually grabbed these balls and performed the experiment. Ignoring air resistance, objects released from the same height will always reach the ground at the same time. And the important thing is that Aristotle believed heavier objects fell faster, and he never thought to test it. He made the basic mistake of believing that reasoning alone could lead him to truth, but we shan't make this mistake here. The Conjunction Fallacy A 'conjunction' between two ideas is when you take one idea and the other. The Conjunction Fallacy is thinking that the conjunction of two ideas is more likely than any of them. For example, thinking that "Bill is in the Department of Mysteries and plays Snap for a hobby." is more likely than either "Bill is in the Department of Mysteries." or "Bill plays Snap for a hobby," when both are necessarily individually more likely than the first, as a rule of probability. This extends to many different hypotheses of varying length. The more ands there are in your explanation, the less likely it becomes, so always look for a sneaky and in everything you think. Complexity in an explanation gives it a penalty, because each new thing you add to it needs to be separately explained and supported by the evidence. Evidence and Expectation Evidence is, in general, everything that makes you believe something as opposed to something else. The fact that you observe a lack of shoes around my feet would make you believe I am not wearing shoes. The fact that you look at your watch and observe the time as 11:40AM makes you believe it is 11:40AM as opposed to 11:30AM. This is because, when it's 11:40AM, you're more likely to observe that fact on your watch than when it's not 11:40AM. Evidence, then is anything that behaves differently depending on what is true; something that behaves the same no matter what the state-of-the-world is cannot serve as evidence to anything. Furthermore, something is evidence of A as opposed to B if that something is more likely to be observed when A is true as opposed to when B is true. It is also quantitative. While looking at your watch and seeing 11:40AM may convince you that it's 11:40AM, if five other people look at their watches and see 11:39AM, you would be convinced that your watch was incorrect; and likewise, if they all saw 11:40AM too, you would instead be even more sure that it was 11:40AM than you were before. The converse of evidence is expectation. If seeing 11:40AM on my watch is more likely when it is 11:40AM, then conversely if I believe it is 11:40AM, I should expect to see 11:40AM on my watch. For an observation to be evidence of a hypothesis, it needs to be expected when I believe this hypothesis to be true. To use another example: if I believe the sky to be blue, when I look outside I will expect to see a blue sky. And the negation of this expectation is surprise and confusion. When you're surprised or confused, when you notice that your expectations did not match up with reality, that means something you believed was false. Always pay attention to surprises, because they are amongst the most informative events. This, then, ties belief deeply with differential expectation. For a belief to be meaningful, there needs to be a way it could be false; if no matter what you observe, you will keep believing it, then how can you be said to believe it? How is the world different if that belief is true as opposed to if it is false? Superstition If a justified belief is differentially expressed by evidence, and falsifiable, then the unjustified belief is the superstition. It's the belief in a correlation that is not there, in the face of contradicting evidence, due to selective recall and narrative memory: believing that black cats bring bad luck by remembering all the instances of bad luck after seeing a black cat and forgetting all the instances where there was no bad luck at all, and reinforcing one's belief by this selective attention. A while ago, certain muggle scientists made a machine to dispense food to mice on the press of a button, except it did not always release the food, but rather had a probability of releasing. Now, at some point, one mouse ran around its cage and pressed the button, and got lucky with the food. Then it tried that again, and got lucky once more. And thus was born a superstition in a mouse. This experiment was repeated with other animals; pigeons developed quite elaborate dances that they believed were somehow related to the food. And like mentioned, of the most interesting things about these superstitions was that they seemed to resist falsification. Minds - human or otherwise - want to find patterns, discover and exploit causation. When we understand the cause of something, we can control it. This surely has a very interesting evolutionary explanation, but the point is that even after their dances failed to produce the food, the animals insisted on doing it every time. There is no virtue in not changing your mind, and in being steadfast in your beliefs. If your observations conflict with what you believe, if reality comes out a different way than you expect, then you change your mind. It is you who are wrong, and not reality. And while a strange dance before pressing a button may be correlated with food coming out, each time the dance fails to get food to come out should be a strike against your hypothesis. It is not enough to notice the feeling of confusion if your automatic reaction is to reject reality and continue believing whatever you want. Another common response is trying to patch up your superstition; for instance, in the pigeon case, the dance started very simple, just a movement of the head, but evolved into a complex series of many steps born out of a desire to explain the previous dances' failures. But more complex explanations are always less likely, as mentioned above, and if you find yourself patching your explanations up and making them more and more complex, you might suspect you have a superstition in your hands. Final Summary * Belief is quantitative, continuous. You should never be 100% or 0% sure of anything, but always in between. There's always room to become more or less sure of something, as you observe the world. You can never be 100% sure that you are in this classroom; maybe you are in your bead dreaming, or being charmed into believing you're in a classroom. You can never be 100% sure what you remember of yesterday really happened. And how do you deal with that? You weigh it up. If you think there's a 10% chance that you were Memory Charmed, then you should act with this in mind. Your beliefs are always a mixture, always a continuum. * Observing the world should change your mind. When something happens and it could have happened in another way if something else was true, that should make your beliefs - or your confidence in them - change. * The way your observations change your mind depends on your expectations, which is to say, your previous beliefs. Beliefs don't come from nowhere, they come from other beliefs. The world is not surprising. From the beginning of time, not a single unusual thing has happened. If you are surprised, it is not the world that is at fault; reality cannot be incorrect. Reality is not surprising, and if you are surprised, that is a fault of your model-of-the-world, that is a failure of your beliefs, and it is your beliefs that must change; reality surely won't. * When you looked at your watch and it said it was 3:42PM, that made you believe that it was, in fact, 3:42PM because if it hadn't been, then you'd have seen something else. You always need to compare reality to its alternatives. All of your beliefs are quantitative, and you should never be 100% sure that it is not in fact 4:50AM, even after seeing 3:42PM on your watch. It's quantitative, but it's not all grey. There is no value in throwing your hands up in the air and saying, 'Alas, we cannot ever be 100% sure of anything, so why bother even trying?' No, you are not 100% sure that it is 3:42PM as opposed to 4:50AM, but you are much sur''er''. The hypothesis that says 'It is 3:42PM' is, when compared to the hypothesis that says 'It is 4:50AM,' much stronger. No theory stands on its own, and the merit of a theory is exactly in how it fares against other theories. Without proper opponents for it to fight,without theories that say Zig while your theory says Zag, you cannot prove that a theory is true. * Falsification. The surest-fire way to prove a hypothesis is true is, paradoxically, in trying to prove that it is false. Trying to come up with experiments, very stringent ones, whose intuitively expected results would disprove your hypothesis. Try to shoot yourself in the foot and miss. And make an honest effort at it, because the more you fail at disproving yourself, the more confident you should be that you are right. Find things that your theory says should not happen, and try to make them happen.